12 Song

He lurked at the fringes of the crowd, as he always did.

Watching, as he always did.

Even in the warmth of the sun, Song wrapped himself in several layers, his clothing rent with great tears and the hems all tattered, the patterns on the cloth smeared with filth and blackened where they dragged the ground. His hood was up, so that his scarred and ravaged face could only be glimpsed: the empty socket of his left eye, the smashed nose laying on the right cheek, the gaping darkness between his remaining teeth, the shiny white tracks of burns over the left side of his face, pulling and twisting at the flesh. Those who glanced at his face always quickly looked away—except sometimes the children who would point and stare.

"That's just Song," the parents would tell them, pulling the children away with a brief glance at Song himself, talking as if Song weren't there, as if he couldn't see or hear them. Sometimes, they might toss a penny in his direction in compensation for their son's or daughter's rudeness. He'd stare at the tiny coin on the pavement, not deigning to pick it up. Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps for others, he was sometimes called "Mad Song."

He generally didn't attend the Guji's blessing, but he'd heard the rumors flowing through the nether regions of Orbis; he'd seen the whispers of possibilities in his vision-bowl, and so he'd come. The Mategician had been stupid, so stupid that Song decided that the clumsy assassination attempt must have been carried out entirely through the man's own foolish impulse. Certainly Envoy wei'Shamoke wouldn't have condoned this. No, this person had to be a rogue within the Mategician, and one that the Envoy would quickly renounce if only to save his own flesh. Song watched the Huangd Patrol hustle the man roughly away, shoving him through the door of a neighboring government building. He shook his head; whoever the Mategician was—and he was not one of those Song recognized, probably someone new to the city—he was destined for a slow, painful end.

But what interested Song more than the doomed would-be assassin was the young woman the Guji brought into his carriage afterward. Song had seen her torii-driven carriage near South-gate and he'd wondered who the Guji had sent for, so he'd followed her to the temple. He'd seen that it was her defense that had foiled the attack. He knew enough about the techniques of Misogi use by the torii that the speed and power with which the woman reacted had widened his remaining eye and made him scratch at the ruined skin of his chin.

Now he knew why an image of a young woman had haunted the vision-bowl.

This one... this one would bear watching. Obviously the Guji felt the same, for the woman stayed with him as the torii around the dwarf's carriage began their chants and the carriage made its turn onto the Boulevard in its slow procession toward the Old Shrine amid the renewed clamor of the wind-horns atop the shrine domes and the cheers of the crowds—doubly pleased that their beloved religious leader had escaped unharmed.

As the crowds closed in around the Guji, Song watched them go, unsurprised that the Guji would keep to his routine despite the attack. After all, ritual was important in Orbis. The city was bound and fettered and choked with ritual, as ancient and unyielding as the walls that had once enclosed it. The carriage passed within a few dozen strides of where Song lurked at the corner of an apartment building. He stared not only at the Guji, but at the woman who sat alongside him, looking uncomfortable at the attention, her face weary.

Song would watch this young woman. He would know who she was.

Song slunk back deeper into the shadows between the buildings. Silent, a shadow himself, he slid away from the Boulevard and the noise, finding his own hidden path through the city.